the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you the latest news from our garden. You may remember me from such posts as “The Shapeless Ones”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristically horticultural pose. You might be able to see how jungly the garden has gotten with all the rain we’ve had. I mean not rain like places where it rains a lot get, but rain like places where it doesn’t rain much (like here) get.

The guy I live with has been weeding, in preparation for the garden being on tour weekend after next. Now he says he wishes he hadn’t volunteered for that, because he has to do something. He would rather do nothing. (That includes going to his ninth tax appointment of the year, two days ago.)

I guess all that can be done is just keep weeding.

The grass right in front of me, in the picture above, is Achnatherum calamogrostis. The guy I live with really wanted this one, so he got a plant about nine years ago, and now it’s started seeding all over the place. I guess there’s a lesson to be learned. Not that that will make any difference.

The guy I live with posted another picture of himself in full weeding gear, with weeder in hand, on Facebook, so I thought I would show you a slightly different picture. He does look serious. I tried to say that looking serious won’t have any effect on the weeds, but decided not to.

When he had his eyes tested earlier this year, the eye doctor said that there were little spots in his eyes which were sun damage, so he wears sunglasses as much as possible now. He wore them before, but not as much as now. He said the sunglasses create an air of mystery. I’m a little doubtful.He said his wife was against him getting the machete, but he got it anyway, and when they chopped up dead tree branches she was surprised at how efficient it was. “See?”, he said, smugly. But then he noticed the steel was too soft to be cutting up tree branches, and there were big gouges in the blade. “See?”, she said.

Well anyway. This was a good winter for weeds, but a bad one for a lot of woody plants. I’m not going to show a picture of the almost-completely-dead Kentucky coffee tree, or the half-dead honey locust, or any of the other similarly almost dead shrubs, because there isn’t much point, and the guy I live with just says “Whatever”, the way he does.
The mesquite, though is doing really well (just like the desert willows are). That’s Philadelphus lewisii on the right, in flower. 

It has thorns.You can see the house needs painting. The guy I live with was going to do the whole house last October, but his mom died, and then the cancer stuff, so it looks like this.

And the mesquite will get the dead branches removed when the guy I live with feels like spending time with heavy gloves and maybe even safety glasses.

Penstemon brandegei is flowering. There are only a couple of plants left so he should probably collect seed and sow it in the front yard. This is a huge penstemon, by the way.There are a few plants of Salvia recognita in the front yard. They’re pinker than the phone pictures show.

The rose ‘Darlow’s Enigma’ has started to flower. It had a good winter. This picture isn’t very focused at all.The seed pods of Eremurus spectabilis are pretty cool-looking. So, as I said, it was a pretty nice day today. No thunder. Plenty of sun. Even late in the day, the clouds didn’t turn into anything scary.Oh, I should also say that we got a new laptop. The other one was barely working, and eventually the guy I live with had to use another computer monitor, attached to the laptop, which made for quite a clutter on the kitchen table.

I think that’s it for today. Not really much of anything, but that’s the story of our life here. Not much of anything. Just the way we like it.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here to bring you up to date on the latest news from our garden, on what turned out to be a very beautiful day. You may remember me from such posts as “Divers Things”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.It was a really beautiful day today. Sunny, without any dark clouds and scary thunder appearing in the afternoon and frightening me. We had a sunny day yesterday, after a cold and cloudy morning.

You can’t always tell what the weather will be like on any given day. It can be deceptive. This is what the sky looked like on a day with lots of thunderstorms.Today, the sky looked like this, but even though there were clouds, it wasn’t one of those days that send me running to my upstairs fort.

Maybe you get the idea that in the last several months the guy I live with has felt pretty overwhelmed by things in his life. He does very well with stress, though working with his mom’s estate has been a bit much. He has his ninth tax appointment of the year this week. He says it is okay to be jealous of that. (And you thought he didn’t have a sense of humor.) In fact he often wonders if some people do have any sense of humor at all.

But whatever; back to the stress business. He “rather foolishly” agreed to have the garden on tour at the end of this month and doesn’t have the slightest idea how he is going to have things look even remotely presentable. There is no one else to help in the garden now that his wife, who loved to weed, with Chess at her side, is gone. On the other hand it isn’t like he has all that much else to do, besides the tax thing and visiting his friend.

He says things will be fine, and if the garden looks really bad, he just throw drop cloths on the weedy parts and tell visitors that there are mysterious experiments going on under the drop cloths.

The garden is more overgrown than it has ever been. We’ve had lots of rain. 

A lot of the grasses you see in the picture above are ones we want to have, but a lot aren’t, too.

The “way back” is even worse. You can see a whole bunch of smooth brome growing around, and also in, the blue lyme grass.  The field full of smooth brome is just a few feet over to the right (west). It crawls under the fence and sends runners hundreds of feet away. The guy I live with says it’s like the Ultimate Weed.

And there’s the catmint. The guy I live with’s wife wanted it, and so he planted it, and now it’s absolutely everywhere. (The cinder block isn’t supposed to be there, but never got moved back where the others are, waiting to be concealed by a low fence.)“And the feverfew.” I forget about that, sometimes, but it’s also everywhere. There’s some right there in the picture, near the cinder block.

There are some things flowering, too. You can see Asphodeline damascena, in this not-very-focused picture.

The first flower on Rosa kokanica:But as the guy I live with would say, this isn’t a summer-oriented garden any more, as far as flowers are concerned. It’s mostly grasses, though native ones, not the kind you find in nurseries, which mostly need too much water to do well here.

There are some plants that are still important here, for flowers. You may remember the post “A Sad Farewell” (the one I posted, not the one the guy I live with posted before Chess took over the blog), where I talked about the desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, possibly being killed, and he was really wondering about it just a few weeks ago, even though it grew taller than him last summer, but things seem to be back to normal now.The desert willow likes heat, of which we haven’t had much of. We purebred border collies do not like hot weather at all, but the guy I live with does.

He wanted to move to Tucson when he retired (or Portland; it changed from week to week), to get away from the weather here. His wife was against moving to either place, for reasons he never understood, though there was some talk about how hot it got in the desert. He would tell her about the “clear” scorpions and spiders as big as a dinner plate (possibly an exaggeration), because she liked bugs, but it wasn’t enough to sway her.

So we have a desert willow (three, actually) which yearns for the warmth of more southerly climes. (I always wanted to say “climes”.)  But when it flowers, the whole garden is scented of violets, at night.

I guess I’m going to have to endure three weeks of nothing but weeding, and complaining that it isn’t hot enough for the desert willows, but things could be worse. I’ll leave you with a picture of me, walking along, surrounded by nothing but weeds. 

Until next time, then.